Right, though there doesn’t seem to be much interest, in the spirit of keeping anyone following the thread up to date, here is the latest:
Server and Clients were all updated to the latest (13.061) on Friday. Everything has been working well on the farm until last night. When I went home, I had a queue of 10 jobs. I come in this morning, expecting them to all be done, but find there is still one chugging away. I had a look at the clients to see how many I had (many of the machines on the farm go offline as their users show up to start the day’s work), and discovered that while I have 6 clients at the moment, only 1 of them - again my workstation which also acts as server - were rendering any of the frames from the project.
I figured the same BS freerender bug must be in play again, so I ‘remoted’ in to one of the nodes to have a look at its console, but saw no error message, just that it had stopped rendering around midnight.
I quit and restarted the Client, and while it connected to the server instantly, it was not assigned any frames from the current job. So, I stopped the job, and restarted it. All of the Clients jumped on board and received frames, but within seconds had all ‘stopped rendering’ again.
Now, the way I am working is, I will suss out a scene and then render a few different passes of it. One or two with a Sketch and Toon style applied, and a couple of raytraces with different elements visible (object buffers won’t work here as need to have what is behind objects that are not visible). So, I’ll do a “Save Project With Assets” directly into the user->admin folder for the Net Server, ensuring that all textures are in their right place. Once complete, I’ll evoke the same command again, naming the project differently according to the changes I am set to make (which normally just means turning off S&T, setting a different output range, or hiding an object or three), and then doing just a regular save when said changes are complete. These changes never involve new textures.
So, the scene in question 05_13_D_All is having an issue that 05_13_D_Toms did not, even though the sole difference between them are visible objects. There are no errors being reported by the Server or the Clients, they just refuse to render this one scene.
It is as if the freerender bug still exists, but Maxon has ‘updated’ the software to no longer display that message. I doubt that’s the case, but the behavior, aside from that one message is exactly the same. Considering I have 130 scenes to do, this issue is more than just a little frustrating.